Exhibition Review: Stacey Steers: Night Reels

Night Reels, a solo exhibition surveying the work of Denver-based artist and filmmaker Stacey Steers, currently on view at the George Eastman Museum, is really two shows. One is a continuous screening of three of Steers’s animated films, playing back-to-back in a room just inside the entrance, while the other is an exhibition of multimedia installations in the larger Project Gallery, in the far back corner of the museum. Steers’s stop-motion animated collages Phantom Canyon (2006), Night Hunter (2011), and Edge of Alchemy (2017) have a tactile visual magic, amplified by original soundtracks, each by a different composer. They are experimental and delightful, but dark and personal, plunging deep into Dada and surrealist traditions. Every second of motion in Steers’s films is composed of up to eight individual collages, which means each film (ranging from ten to twenty...